What makes the 2020 Democratic National Convention original and remarkable? There have been so many features not only of “ordinary Americans” but of Americans who have not traditionally have been underrepresented or not represented–and of vulnerable Americans–that we have a national party convention with an unprecedented theme of people speaking from the heart. That’s the slightly unsettling effect of this year’s Democratic National Convention: It’s less of a pageant than these conventions always have been, and even the pageantry features less professional actors than would usually be the case. It’s an interesting change.
11:11 pm: In keeping with an informal tradition, following the conclusion of the Vice Presidential candidate’s speech, the Presidential candidate walks out to the stage to greet her.
11:08 pm: Senator Harris wisely gives a shout-out to the new generation (Millenials and Gen-Zers) of voters and politicians who have emerged since 2017 to take up the cause of social justice and accountable public service. Yes, more of that (and of them), please.
11:00 pm: Senator Harris observes that Black Americans and Latino Americans have disproportionately suffered illness and death from the COVID-19 illness due to institutional racism and the failure to provide public goods and health benefits to White and nonwhite Americans at a common rate. One effect of the brazen and constant racism of the Trump Administration is that it has swept away any cause for reservation that Democrats in politics may ever have had for speaking indirectly about the fatal effects of White racism in America.
10:59 pm: Senator Harris addresses herself to parents and teachers struggling with remote learning which Trump’s willful failure to contend with the present pandemic virus has made necessary: “you know that what we’re doing right now isn’t working.”
10:56 pm: Senator Harris attributes her decision to become an attorney, a district attorney, Attorney General of the Republic of California, and a U.S. Senator from California, to her belief “that public service is a noble calling, and that the fight for justice is a shared responsibility…”
10:53 pm: Senator Harris opens her acceptance speech with a reference to trailblazing and trend-setting women in public life. She ends the list with her mother, an immigrant from India, who had to raise Kamala and her sister as a single mother from the time that Senator Harris was 5 years old.
10:47 pm: With the striking of a very large gavel, 2020 Democratic National Committee Chairman Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MI) makes Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA)’s nomination as Joe Biden’s running mate official. Congressman Thompson is Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; he seems to be skilled in the art of wielding a gavel to bring deliberations to a conclusion.
10:44 pm: “This Administration has shown that it will tear our democracy down, if that is what it takes to win. So, we have to get busy…” –President Obama
10:41 pm: President Obama recalls the recent passing of Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), a marcher with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. President Obama observes that Black Americans in the Jim Crow South had as much cause to be cynical about American constitutionalism and democracy as anyone, but that rather than be cynical about it, they took extraordinary measures in order to compel America to embody its principles more fully than it had before.
10:37 pm: President Obama addresses himself to undecided and uncommitted voters: Trump and the Republicans already know that they won’t win majority support from Americans, so they are counting on Americans’ cynicism to get them to sit out this election, and they are going to great lengths to inconvenience and burden voting in order to suppress turnout. President Obama urges Americans not to let these people take their democracy away from them.
10:31 pm: President Obama observes that Vice President Biden understands Americans’ loss of their livelihoods from his experience of his father’s loss of his job when Biden was a child, and that he understands the many Americans currently confronting the loss of a loved one from the deaths of his first wife and child in 1972 and the death of his son Beau, himself a rising star in Delaware politics, from brain cancer in 2015. President Obama remarks that Vice President Biden–and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris–understand Americans’ vulnerabilities and challenges because of experience, and care about addressing them.
10:29 pm: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t–and the consequences of that failure are severe.” –former President Barack Obama says that Donald Trump has utterly disappointed the one hope that he had about him, specifically that he would come to take the Presidency seriously once he occupied that office.
10:23 pm: Former President Barack Obama is quoted as having said (at a rally in Wilmington, Delaware for then-Senate candidate Chris Coons on October 15, 2010) that choosing Senator Joseph Biden to be his running mate and become his Vice President was “the single best decision I have made.” I agree; Joseph Biden was an excellent Vice President, advisor to the President, and advocate for President Obama’s agenda.
10:20 pm: “Our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and a kick in the pants to everyone else.” –Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Senator Warren recounts a compelling personal story about how her Aunt Bea’s willingness to move into her home for 16 years to care for he children was the only way that she was able to remain in the workforce. Senator Warren reminds us of how Americans are unable to attain their goals for education and work because the United States is benighted in its lack of readily-available or affordable child care for working parents.
10:15 pm: During an extended segment featuring small business owners trying to stay in business in the face of the brutal economic headwinds created by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a farmer says of Trump and farming, “No, he has no idea about any of this stuff.”
10:06 pm: There is a genuinely provocative and effective video that features then-Senator Biden listening to the testimony of a woman victimized by domestic violence. People forget how Conservative the politics of the 1990s were–and in that toxic political environment, Senator Biden was able to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which is apparently too liberal for today’s Republicans, on a bipartisan basis in 1994.
10:02 pm: Women survivors of domestic violence and their advocates refer to their brutal experiences and to what they know, against the backdrop of the Violence Against Women Act–cosponsored by then-Senators Joe Biden (D-DE) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT)–which was renewed by the Democratic House of Representatives in April 2019 but allowed to languish without passage in the Republican Senate with no input from Trump; currently, the Violence Against Women Act has been allowed to lapse by Republicans and Trump.
9:59 pm: Speaker Pelosi gets right to what I want her to talk about: The House of Representatives passed a $3.4 trillion emergency economic and financial relief and stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, in mid-May…and have waited until now, mid-August, for Senate Republicans and Donald Trump to agree to any kind of a relief bill that they can even pass through the Congressional chamber they control. Speaker Pelosi can talk at length about Trump’s and the Republicans’ failure to govern, because the House of Representatives has passed scores of bills on which the Senate has simply failed to act, and for which Donald Trump has doubtlessly been characteristically been grateful for the opportunity to duck the question of whether he would support Progressive but popular legislation.
9:57 pm: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets her cue to speak at the same time that her speech is announced by voice-over. It’s not substance, but it’s fair to observe that the transition to a all-remote national party convention still isn’t seamless in its process.
9:52 pm: “Remember: Joe and Kamala can win the Election by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me.” –Secretary Clinton
9:48 pm: “…People who voted for Donald Trump asked, ‘What have we got to lose?’ Well, our health care, our jobs, our loved ones, our position in the world…and even our Post Office…” –Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
9:43 pm: Preceding former Secretary of State and 2-time Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s prime time speech is a fittingly long tribute to the many women in the Democratic Party who have risen to extraordinary public stature. The accession of so many women to politics, particularly in the wake of Trump’s grotesque Inauguration to the Presidency in January 2017, has done as much as anything to make the occupants of elected office around the country resemble this country more than they ever have before.
9:36 pm: Following the missive to Trump from the child of a deported mother is an appeal and a call to action from 3 women of different immigration status whose differing situations serve to highlight the irrationality and the cruelty of our slow-moving naturalization system and our increasingly restrictive immigration procedures and standards.
This is followed by a recording of a speech by former President Barack Obama celebrating the experiences, efforts, and contributions of immigrants in America. Of course President Obama set a great example for public service in high office, and stirred the base of the Republican Party into an ongoing frenzy of hate: This commonality of theme isn’t lost when it’s President Obama who is chosen to speak of the immigrant experience in Donald Trump’s America. The Republican Party of Donald Trump, after all, wages war not just against aspiring Americans but against millions of Americans that don’t fit meekly into its impoverished and narrow preconceptions about what an American should look like.
9:32 pm: A daughter of a veteran Marine–a former Trump voter–whose mother was deported to Mexico by Trump reads a letter to Donald Trump, interspersed towards the end with clips of Trump saying of illegal immigrants “I want to get these people out of here,” and “They’re animals!” It’s beyond my comprehension, frankly, how so many millions of Americans can be enthusiastic about the forced family separations and deportations of immigrants with extreme prejudice which seem to be Trump’s point of greatest pride from his time in the Presidency; it’s no easier for me to comprehend how so many millions more Americans can at least seem not to bear such animus towards immigrants in their hearts, but nonetheless care so little about them that they can see these family separations and prejudicial expulsions of so many immigrants who just want to live and peace and have a chance to work, and still support Donald Trump.
9:10 pm: Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), whose husband, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, is currently running for United States Senate, felt that she had to end her political career prematurely after a mass shooter indiscriminately murdered and maimed attendees of one of her public events in January 2011 and critically wounded the Congresswoman. I haven’t seen Congresswoman Giffords give a public address of significant length since she sustained a serious head injury during that mass shooting. Tonight Congresswoman Giffords exhibited the damage that her injury did to her capacity to speak, though it is clear that Congresswoman Giffords knows what she wants to say. The extended speech by a public figure whose present reminds us of such an unpleasant (though in this country not uncommon) episode of mass murder, with no touches to hide the difficulty the former Congresswoman has with speaking, is another example of the consistency with which the 2020 Democratic National Convention has brought many of America’s serious problems to the fore.
The Liberal Ironist 